Debunking the Hats of Search Engine Optimization

20 Apr,2018

Search Engine Optimization or SEO has always been a hot topic for a long time now. For the novices, SEO is the process of optimizing your website so it appears on the top results of a search engine. While there are many methods and strategies that SEO company in Oklahoma city follow, they all boil down to two philosophies: the white hat and the black hat.

Here, we will discuss these two and try to debunk how SEO really works.

White Hat SEO

Generally, white hat SEO is doing optimization by diligently following the guidelines of search engines and not doing anything illegal and anything that involves scams. There are a lot of ways to help your business rank in search engines without getting in trouble. However, you have to remember that even if you are following the rules, the results of SEO are not instant.

The key to a successful SEO also lies in your patience and consistent hard work. Below are some white hat tips you can follow when you are starting SEO for your business:

Get to know keywords. Keywords are the group of words that Internet users use to search for something that they want online. If you utilize these keywords, you will have a higher chance of becoming visible to your target audience.

When you know what keywords to use, it is imperative that you include it in the title of your webpage.

Ensure that you also use these keywords all throughout the page but pay attention so you do not overuse it or else, you will be flagged as spam. Research for ways to vary the keywords and the proper density of keyword appearance on the page.

Black Hat SEO

Blackhat SEO is literally the opposite of white hat SEO. These techniques often involve cheating in hope that it will make the website’s ranking higher in a faster timeframe. However, you have to remember that SEO algorithms of search engines are dynamic and they are always changing. More importantly, they are getting smarter.

If they find that you are cheating, you would most probably get flagged or worse, get banned. And, it could be hard to try and rank again after these penalties. Among the most common black hat SEO techniques are below:

Keyword Stuffing: This basically means what it is called. It is the excessive use of keywords on a single page. Sometimes, black hat SEO practitioners duplicate the keywords at the bottom of the page where it is not seen by the users. Other times, they make these texts invisible by using the same color of the background to the text.

Page Stuffing: Like keyword stuffing, page stuffing is the act of duplicating an entire page. First, black hat SEO practitioners try to rank one page of their website. When it already becomes high in the search engine results, they duplicate it so they both rank at the same time on top of the search results.

Link Farms: SEO company in Oklahoma city experts know how important backlinks are when it comes to SEO. However, there are scammers who take it the wrong way. Backlinks become black hat when someone buys a link farm, or a group of links, where the sole purpose is to interlink with each other for spider crawling purposes. Today, search engines are smarter and they actually ban all the links involved in a link farm from getting indexed.